Week 5 - POLC Flashcards
What is planning?
- Defining the organisation’s goals
- Establishing an overall strategy for achieving those goals
- Developing plans to integrate and coordinate activities
- Concerned with both ends (goals) as well as means (strategy)
What are the types of planning?
informal & formal
Why plan?
- Provides direction
- Reduces uncertainty
- Minimises waste and redundancy
- Establishes goals and standards used for controlling
What are Goals
(ie ends)
- Desired outcomes for individuals, groups, or entire organisations
- Provide direction and performance evaluation criteria
- Multiple (e.g. financial, environmental, social)
- Stated vs. real
What are Plans
- Documents how goals are to be accomplished and how resources are to be allocated
- Provides a map to arrive at a given destination with provision for detours
Types of Plans
See image
What is Organising?
Arranging and structuring work to accomplish the organisation’s goals
The process of creating an organisation’s structure - the formal arrangement of jobs within an organisation
Elements of Organising
Work specialisation
- Dividing work activities into specific job tasks
Departmentalisation
- Grouping of jobs by function, location, product, process, customer
Chain of Command
- Authority, responsibility, unity of command
Span of Control
- Number of subordinates a manager can manage efficiently and effectively
Centralisation/de-centralisation
- Degree to which decision making is controlled by a few vs. delegated to many
Formalisation
- The degree to which jobs within an organisation are standardised and the extent to which employee behaviour is guided by rules & procedures
Types of Organisations
Mechanistic
- High specialisation
- Rigid departmentalisation
- High chain of command
- Narrow spans of control
- High formalisation
- Centralised
Organic
- Cross functional teams
- Cross hierarchical teams
- Free flow of information
- Wide spans of control
- Low formalisation
- Decentralised
What is Leading?
(Leader & Leadership)
A leader is:
- someone who can influence others who may or may not possess managerial authority
Leadership is:
- the process of influencing a group to achieve goals
Because leading is one of the four management functions, ideally all managers should be leaders
Leadership theories
Trait theories
Behavioural theories
Contingency theories
Trait leadership theories
- Leaders are born and cannot be trained
- ‘Traits’ differentiate leaders from non-leaders: drive, desire to lead, honesty and integrity, self confidence, intelligence etc.
Behavioural leadership theories
- Leadership is more than possessing a few generic traits
- Leaders are not born, but trained
- Iowa, Ohio State, Michigan, Managerial Grid
- Duality of leadership: focus on task vs. focus on people
Contingency leadership theories
- Effective leadership requires more than an understanding of traits and behaviours
- Ability to ‘read’ and ‘adapt’ to situational circumstances as important
- Fiedler’s contingency model (leader-member relations, task, power)
- Situational leadership model (employee readiness)
What is controlling?
The process of monitoring, comparing and correcting work performance
